Official Visit Of His Royal Highness Haakon Crown Prince of Norway and Her Royal Highness Mette-Marit, Crown Princess of Norway to Malaysia.

( 7-10 March 2010 )

I just wanted to share with you my department responsibility when Head of State, or when there is an Official Visit from Royal members especially The King and The Queen or Crown Prince or Princess come to Malaysia, my department was responsible to make full coverage from the very first day they touch down at the airport until they leave our country. We are responsible to make an album for them, full of pictures during their visit here in Malaysia.

So in this case like the picture above, my department send two photographers to cover this event in Putrajaya where official welcoming ceremony was held. I have to rush from here and going up to Prime Minister office for another shot. In this kind of event we must work very fast, we have to know exactly the flow of the ceremony, so we can plan our movement, where to stay, where to get the best possible angle and when to move next. Our equipment must be in top notch condition, there is no room for an error and that’s why you see some of them carry more than one camera and like the picture above some of them even carry three camera with them.

Actually there is not much times to switch lens here, from wide angle lens to telephoto lens, there is not much time to fiddle with the camera and lenses , so by having two camera body with different lens attached will make our job easier and faster. We need to get the wide shot and also a tighter shot of the person involved especially the leaders and then we also need some wide shot to show where the event taking place and also to show the environment of those area but usually for Wired Agency they will prefer a tight shot of the leader to grace front page of a newspaper or for a website. Loose shot with the surrounding area will not have a strong impact if it was published on the internet, so a tighter shot will be more appealing to the viewer due to the small size of our picture on the internet or website.

But for my department, we need to show the whole story of the event, so we need both and we will printed both of the picture, a tighter shot and also a loose one where it shows the surrounding area where the event taking place, it is normal for this event for a photographers to use long telephoto lens like 300 mm up until 500 mm to get a tighter shot of the leader, just to let you know during the guard of honor inspection by the leader we are position quite far away so in order to get the best view, telephoto lens is a must have item. We can cropped from a short telephoto lens but it will loose some details so it is always better to get it tight in the camera rather than crop it later in Photoshop.